A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.
In the third installment of the Happy Valley Chronicles, second grader Celia Canterberry faces the seemingly impossible task of making new friends while dealing with human and imaginary enemies.
Seven-year-old Celia is distraught when her best friend, Archibald Quigley, abandons her for Eugenia Whitford—the niece of Enid Whitford, her grandmother’s employer whom Celia calls her “number one nemesis.” Celia’s teacher, Miss Dobbs, shamelessly favors Eugenia, hoping to win the heart of the youngster’s recently widowed father. Celia turns to her neighbor Old Lady Griggs for advice on how to make friends. Griggs is invested in helping Celia connect with others, drawing on tips from Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. However, most of these strategies—sometimes due to Celia’s mistaken interpretations—don’t quite turn out as they’d hoped. Celia has impatience beyond her years that effectively furnishes the story with a tone of comedic grumpiness; for example, when Miss Dobbs has the class celebrate a Halloween “Spooktacular,” featuring presentations on notable Happy Valleyans, the girl is utterly annoyed: “As if a seven-year-old could scrounge up a useful and brand-new nugget of information. I mean, I could, but not the rest of these numbskulls.” Nan, her grandmother, instills in her a love for literature; they have a book club in which they read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, from which excerpts are quoted. Indeed, there are countless references to 19th- and 20th-century European and American literature and popular culture, which some readers will find delightful. Celia’s boundless imagination produces her “storybook” friends with whom she either interacts or whom she embodies during make-believe play. Readers may want to brush up on Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Pimpernel before reading to avoid missing out on the nuances that these tales provide to this story. Overall, some will find this work to be reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, although it’s aimed at an adult readership. Froese’s simple black-and-white line drawings depict various people and events in the text.
A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Black Crow Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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